school says that they don’t think anything’s changed, that she’s the same as ever. But, on the other hand, Elizabeth seems to think she’s better. And God knows, Sarah spends more time with Elizabeth than with any of the rest of us. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I really don’t.”
They said their good-byes, and Rose stood on the porch and watched as Ray drove down to the Point Road. Then she turned and stared speculatively across the field to the woods that hid the embankment from her view. Finally she turned back to the house, and went upstairs to find her children.
* * *
They were in the playroom, and the door stood open. Rose stayed silently in the hall for a moment, watching as Elizabeth patiently built a tower, then rebuilt it after Sarah knocked it down. Rose once more was impressed with Elizabeth’s patience with her strange younger sister.
Elizabeth looked up as her mother came into the room, and smiled.
“One of these days the tower is going to stand,” she said. “And on that day I’m going to tell Sarah that it’s time for a new toy. Until then, I build and she knocks over.” Elizabeth immediately noticed the pain in her mother’s face, and tried to reassure her. “I don’t mind, Mother. I’d rather have her knock them over than not do anything at all.”
Rose relaxed, but only a little. In her mind she blessed Elizabeth once more. Aloud she said, “Elizabeth, you don’t go near the embankment or the woods, do you?”
“Of course not, Mother,” Elizabeth said, not looking up from the new construction she was building for Sarah. “You’ve already told me how dangerous it is. Why would I want to go there?”
She put the last block in place, and watched as Sarah’s arm came out to knock it over.
2
Jack Conger reached instinctively to adjust the mirror as he turned off the Point Road into the long driveway. He was a fraction of a second too late, and the glint of the setting sun caught him in the eyes just before it moved off his face to settle in a harmless rectangle in his lap. He blinked reflexively, and once more cursed his ancestor who had so conscientiously laid this road out on its perfect east-west axis. New England neatness, he thought. God, they were all so—he groped for the right word, then made his choice as he looked down the driveway at his home—severe. That was it, all right. They were severe. An absolutely straight drive leading to an absolutely plain house. He wondered just which of his forebears had had the temerity to break the line of the house with the wide porch. The porch, he had always felt, didn’t really fit the house, though without it the house would have been totally lacking in any kind of warmth. Jack parked the car in front of the converted carriage house, now the garage, and went around the corner of the house to go in the front door. The Congers, he had been taught since birth, always used the front door. The side door was for children, and the rear for servants and merchants. Jack knew it was silly, but habit was habit, and besides, it was about the last of the old traditions that he could still keep up. The squire to the end, he thought as he closed the front door behind him.
No butler waited to take his coat, and no maidscurried out of lus study as he entered it He supposed, wryly, that he could pull the old bell cord and ask Mrs. Goodrich to bring him a drink, but he knew he would only be told once more that “grown men can mix their own drinks. Things aren’t the way they used to be, you know.” Then dinner would be slightly burned, just to remind him that he’d overstepped his bounds. He mixed his drink himself.
He had settled himself in front of the fireplace, and was weighing the pros and cons of stoking up the fire when he heard his wife’s footstep in the hall.
“Rose?” he called, almost as if he hoped it wasn’t. “Is that you?”
Rose came into the room, crossed the floor to her husband, and gave him one of those kisses usually classified as a peck. She sniffed at his glass.
“Is there another one of those?”
Jack’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “So early?”
“It’s been one of those days. Will you do the honors, or do I have